Mushpuff, Bird, Plagiarize, Snorter, Klumpkrump, and Qaeron all made their way into the Lizard Fortress. Hoofa needed time to recover from the very tragic death of Gumpton.

On the inside, Lizard Fortress was filled with many small tunnels. These tunnels were too small for Qaeron to fit through, and so he had to wait outside with Hoofa. The rest of the gang made their way through the small passageways of Lizard Fortress until they eventually reached a fork in the road. And, of course, since it was a fork, there were four branching paths and not just two.

“Hmm…” pondered Mushpuff. “Now this is a predicament.”

“No it’s not,” said Klumpkrump. “We have two ways of going about this, I’d say. We can either all go down each path together, or we can split up. I suppose two of us would have to go in one tunnel together, since there’s five of us and four ways to go.”

Just then, there was a very loud sound that was not unlike the type of noise one might hear when a stone wall is blasted through with explosives.

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“Hey, look!” said Plagiarize, pointing at a hole in the wall that wasn’t there a few seconds ago. “A fifth path!”

“You are quite observant today,” noted Klumpkrump.

“It’s my specialty. I suppose this means we can all split up!”

And so it was decided that everyone would split up. Plagiarize offered to go down the tunnel that was blasted open and nobody objected because it seemed like it was probably the most dangerous direction of all of the directions to go.

Meanwhile, outside Lizard Fortress, Hoofa was being sad and Qaeron was doing cartwheels to try to cheer her up, but to no avail. Hoofa had temporarily taken the Energy Cube for herself because she didn’t want Klumpkrump to have it and nobody was willing to try to take it from her.

“Oh, Qaeron…” said Hoofa. “If only you knew how important Gumpton was to me…”

“Mmmm, Qaeron loves fruit,” said Qaeron. “Mmmm, yez, a bear knows how it feels. I onze ate a rotten fruit.”

“That does not make me feel any better,” said Hoofa.